Brandon Stanton Quotes

I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.

I'm greedy about cities - I like to form my impressions of them on my own, and on foot as far as possible, looking and listening, having conversations with bridges and streets and riverbanks, conversations I tend not to be aware of until a little later, when I find myself returning to those places to say hello again, even if only in memory.

Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.

I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

By default, I am a travel photographer. I work on a combination of commissions and personal projects that take me around the world.

My big dream was to work as a photographer for 'National Geographic.'

Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

I love photography, I love food, and I love traveling, and to put those three things together would just be the ultimate dream.

Now very often events are set up for photographers... The weddings are orchestrated about the photographers taking the picture, because if it hasn't been photographed it doesn't really exist.

I'd go down to the end of my street, to a garage that had a certain feeling about it, or a particular light; I'd take a picture of a friend who needed a head shot. That's how I learned, instead of having school assignments and learning camera techniques.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn't be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was not part of Stryker's outfit at all.

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

The main thing I love about street photography is that you find the answers you don't see at the fashion shows. You find information for readers so they can visualize themselves.

I never shot on sets, but if I was traveling somewhere or on location, I would always have my camera, and I'd always be - it's that kind of fly on the wall approach to photography, though. I don't engage the subject. I like to sneak around, skulk about in the dark.

I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

I was drawn to street photography because there are pictures everywhere there: a woman holding a dog, a baby screaming to be put in a pram, kids playing punch ball, stores with huge barrels of kosher pickles outside. I wanted to photograph life, and here it was.

My iPhone has changed my life - I spend hours taking photos of the sidewalk as I walk down the street. I like the casualness, that it's low-resolution.